The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  The sequence leading to death constituted a pattern, Forshufvud realized upon reading Marchand’s diary: slow poisoning by arsenic. The symptoms of such poisoning were all there: alternating somnolence and insomnia, swollen feet, general fatigue, and an enlarged liver. Because arsenic, Forshufvud believed, had been given to Napoleon in small doses over a long period of time, the poison had not been suspected. And the ingestion of tartar emetic and calomel in his last days had made it untraceable in the stomach.

  From his studies, Forshufvud knew that arsenic has a special property. It is indestructible. If Napoleon’s body could be examined, he could test it for arsenic traces. But the Emperor was buried in state in Paris, in a shrine visited by millions of tourists each year. Forshufvud realized he would never have a chance to prove his theory. But then he heard about the locks of hair. He traced a descendant of one of Napoleon’s retinue on St. Helena, and obtained a strand of it for testing.

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  The investigation of the mystery of Napoleon’s death is a textbook example of modern forensic technology at work. By 1962 scientists had developed equipment which bombarded an object with radiation to determine its elements. Forshufvud sent a strand of the hair he had obtained to a forensic scientist, Hamilton Smith, in Glasgow. In Smith’s laboratory, the Scotsman weighed the lone hair strand and sealed it in a polyethylene container. Then the hair strand and a standard arsenic solution were both irradiated for twenty-four hours. The hair strand, it was discovered, contained 10.38 micrograms of arsenic per gram of hair, almost thirteen times the normal amount, which is 0.8 parts per million.

  Excited by this discovery, Forshufvud traveled to Glasgow to confer with Smith. Nonbelievers, Forshufvud said, might declare that the arsenic could have come externally, in some way, from the natural environment, and not been ingested as a poison. Was there a method to discover if the arsenic had been taken internally?

  Smith smiled. A few months earlier, he said, that would have been impossible, because his irradiation equipment did not have the capability of analyzing different sections of a hair strand—only the total strand. But he had just installed an improved technological device which could do so.

  Why was section analysis important? Forshufvud asked, and Smith told him, “If arsenic was absorbed from the natural environment, the analyses of the hair strand would show a constant amount of arsenic along its length. If, on the other hand, arsenic was ingested into the body at intervals, the hair strand would show peaks and valleys of arsenic in each section.” Furthermore, because hair grows at about .014 inches per day, Smith could calculate the time between the peaks.

  Smith performed 140 tests on a new sample of hair which Forshufvud obtained from a lock that had been owned by one of Napoleon’s valets, Jean-Abraham Noverraz. The section analyses showed that the arsenic had not come from the environment, because its content was not constant. Instead, it ranged from a low of 1.86 to a high of 51.2.

  Forshufvud and Smith published their findings in the British scientific journal Nature, on October 14, 1961. Here, it appeared, was proof that the Emperor Napoleon had been assassinated, and the world was fascinated by the forensic detective work which had used modern devices to solve a murder more than a century and a half old.

  But in academia a reaction always inspires a counter-reaction, and some scientists set out to disprove Forshufvud and Smith’s theory. These scientists believed that the arsenic had entered Napoleon’s hair naturally from the environment, and in the late seventies they had a find equal in significance to Forshufvud and Smith’s analyses of Napoleon’s hair. It was, believe it or not, Napoleon’s wallpaper.

  The culmination of their efforts, in which they exposed the wallpaper to neutron-activating equipment, was published in Nature magazine in 1982. The New York Times, with some amusement, wrote an editorial on the scientific debate, entitled “Arsenic and Old Napoleon”:

  Two British scientists note that the emerald greens in 19th century wallpaper were made from a copper-arsenic pigment, which could be converted by a fungus into a deadly arsenical vapor. Having discovered scraps of Napoleon’s St. Helena wallpaper in an old family scrap-book, they say it contains enough arsenic to cause illness, but not death. “Conspiracy theories need not be invoked to explain arsenic found in the hair,” they conclude with a touch of scorn.

  The Times went on to say that the original advocate of the poisoning theory, Sten Forshufvud, not only hotly contested the British scientists’ findings, but thought their theory was “off the wall.”

  Napoleon’s dread words in his will reveal that he did not think the subject was amusing. He believed he was being murdered, but he obviously didn’t know how it was being done or he would have stopped it.

  Arsenic in those days was the poison of choice by murderers, and it was present in suspiciously large amounts in Napoleon’s hair. But was it an assassination or merely an accident? Perhaps we will never know, but a friend of mine with whom I discussed this mystery reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s last words on his deathbed in a dingy Paris boardinghouse:

  “Either that wallpaper goes or I go.”

  DID HITLER ESCAPE?

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  A mystery that emerged from the caldron of World War II may at last be solved. So far it has attracted little attention, but if my friend forensic odontologist Lester Luntz, D.D.S., continues his efforts, and he plans to do so, the world is in for a shock.

  The mystery is this: Did Adolf Hitler, Germany’s fanatical dictator, survive the war and escape?

  To ask the question is to invite ridicule. Western historians, basing their conclusions on “eyewitness” accounts, have said for years that Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in a bunker beneath wartorn Berlin. Then their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned in the garden of the Reich Chancellery above. But not long after the last smoke cleared over the ruins of Berlin, Soviet leaders, from General Zhukov to dictator Joseph Stalin, hinted that Hitler had escaped.

  What actually happened on April 30, 1945? Did Adolf Hitler die?

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  In April 1945, the proud German Army that had once thundered across Europe, then probed deep into Russia, was reduced to a few divisions of men fighting a last-ditch battle in Berlin against the Allies. Adolf Hitler commanded this defense from a fortified bunker deep underground, huddled together with his closest cronies and aides as artillery shells exploded overhead.

  Each day smartly uniformed Nazi generals marched into the bunker and gathered around military maps with the Führer. As red lines indicating the Russian envelopment of the city drew closer, the generals could no longer hide the truth of defeat. And on April 21, 1945, in a conference never forgotten by its participants, Adolf Hitler went into a frenzy. He threw down his pencil on the table, white-faced, then screamed at the frightened generals, “Then it’s finished? The war is lost!”

  From that day, his aides later testified, Hitler began making plans to kill himself. He told them he did not intend to be dragged through Moscow streets in a cage, exhibited like an ape. Instead, he discussed a suicide through poison with his doctors, who recommended potassium cyanide because it acted so swiftly. And in a scene perhaps symbolic of Hitler’s ruthlessness (or “iron will,” as his fanatical followers believed), he had the poison administered to his faithful dog, Blondi, who twitched violently, and died. It was said that when Hitler was called in to see his dead pet on the floor, he merely nodded and, face expressionless, retired from the room.

  In those last desperate days aides pleaded with Hitler to escape. Hans Bauer, undoubtedly one of the most skillful aviators the world has ever known, had been landing and taking off from the street outside the Reich Chancellery, the Wilhelmstrasse. He told Hitler he could fly him to an airbase in northern Germany, and from there he could travel by a long-range German Army transport plane into hiding in a far-off country. Martin Bormann, his deputy, and others pleaded with the Führer to fly to Berchtesgaden, his villa in the Alps, where German troops could guard him in tho
se almost impenetrable mountains.

  But Hitler, according to aides who survived, said no; he had determined to die in Berlin. The idea of suicide by the Führer saddened his followers, but did not surprise them. The Hitler they knew in the bunker was entirely different from the dynamic leader who had single-handedly galvanized the German people and led them into war. Now the Führer was weak-looking, graying, ashen-faced, and his left arm trembled so violently that he sometimes had to hold it still with his other hand.

  His Nazi cronies believed the transformation was not because of the pressures of war, or even the sting of defeat, but instead was due to the exotic pep-up drugs administered to Hitler daily by Dr. Theodore Morell, perhaps the original “Dr. Feelgood.” Morell was scorned by the legitimate doctors who also attended Hitler.

  Day by day, night by night, the Russians drew closer. The Battle of Berlin was a fierce war, fought among rubble which gave excellent protection to the defenders. But the massive might of the Red Army, with Stalin’s “organ grinders” firing multiple artillery shells into the heart of the city, took its toll.

  With defeat inevitable, Hitler took two final steps. He gave permission to his Nazi followers to break out of the bunker and attempt to escape after he died. And he made the dreams of his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, come true. He married her, less than twenty-four hours before they were to die together.

  On the afternoon of April 30, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun retired to Hitler’s living room in the bunker. Hitler had a Walther 7.65-caliber pistol, Eva a smaller one. They each had two cyanide pills. Hitler had been told to place the pistol to his temple, and bite down on the cyanide pill as he pulled the trigger. Eva would simply take the poison.

  Our knowledge of what happened next arises from conflicting testimony of witnesses. We are not even certain which aides waited outside the door. Among them, reportedly, were Major Otto Gunsche, Hitler’s adjutant, Heinz Linge, his valet, Martin Bormann, his deputy, and Arthur Axmann, Nazi Youth leader. Most historians agree Gunsche and Linge were certainly present. But Erich Klempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, for example, was one of the few of the bunker’s inhabitants to escape the Russians and land in Allied lands, and his “eyewitness” account was heavily relied upon by Western historians. Yet twenty-five years later he admitted he was not even inside the bunker at the time.

  According to other of the “bunker people” interrogated later by Western authorities, after returning from Soviet prisons, this is what happened at the time of Hitler’s death. First of all, interestingly, no one ever heard a shot. This fact puzzled them, and their only explanation was that Hitler’s room had a heavy steel door. They waited nervously for ten minutes, then entered the room, where they found Hitler slumped on one side of the sofa (one witness said he was in an armchair), blood running from his temple (one said left temple, another, right), a gun at his feet. Eva Braun was slumped on the other side of the couch. A smell of bitter almonds characteristic of potassium cyanide was in the room. They wrapped the bodies in blankets and carried them up the staircase which led to a door on ground level opening onto the Reich Chancellery garden. There they placed the two bodies in a shallow trench, doused them with gasoline, and set them afire with a flaming rag.

  It was a grisly, perhaps fitting end for the Nazi empire: a few forlorn fanatics huddling in a dark doorway as artillery shells exploded nearby, forcing them to duck inside the building from time to time for protection. They watched a roaring sea of flame consume the Führer who had once ruled with such might and ceremony. But the charred, unrecognizable bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were never buried. The shell fire made it impossible for his aides to remain exposed aboveground long enough to do the job.

  And thus Adolf Hitler died.

  Or did he?

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  Allied troops poised outside Berlin wondered what had become of Hitler. A German radio report on April 30 had said that the Führer had died in action, leading his troops in battle. But the Russians, who now controlled the German capital, said the Nazi dictator had not died. He had escaped. According to an electrifying report published in Time magazine:

  A team of Soviet detectives concluded last week that if Adolf Hitler was dead, he had not died in the ruins of his Reich Chancellery.

  … Behind the bookcase in Hitler’s personal room in the battle-wrecked Chancellery, the sleuths found a thin, concrete, removable panel. Behind it was a man-size hole leading to a super-secret concrete shelter far underground and 500 meters away. Another tunnel connected the shelter with an underground trolley line.

  … In a corridor leading to the secret shelter, the detectives found a charred note in a woman’s handwriting. It told her parents not to worry if they did not hear from her for a long while. The Soviet investigators thought that Eva Braun had written it.

  On May 26, just weeks after the end of the war, Harry Hopkins, a special adviser to U.S. President Harry Truman, arrived in Moscow to confer with Stalin on problems concerning the founding of the United Nations. Stalin told Hopkins that the Russians had not found Hitler’s body. “In my opinion Hitler is not dead, but is hiding somewhere.”

  Ten days later, on June 6, Soviet Marshal Zhukov held a press conference in Berlin. When Western reporters pressed him to explain what had happened to Hitler, Zhukov commented, “I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment. The state of the runway would have allowed him to do so.”

  It was said the press sat dazed after this revelation. Adolf Hitler might have escaped? The resulting uproar in the world press caused the British government to launch its own investigation of Hitler’s fate. It uncovered the chauffeur, Klempka, who claimed he had been in the bunker when Hitler committed suicide, and Herman Karnov, a German policeman who had seen, from the Reich Chancellery roof, the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun burning. “I recognized the Führer by his mustache and Eva Braun by her peculiar black shoes,” he said. But he admitted he couldn’t recognize their features because of the flames.

  The British government published the results of its investigation in an official report which concluded that Adolf Hitler had shot himself, and that Eva Braun had taken poison. But the report was based on scanty evidence, mainly the testimony of Klempka and Karnov; and in light of Soviet denials that Hitler’s body had been found, it was greeted with skepticism.

  In this continuing turmoil, England’s most respected historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, attempted to clear up the mystery once and for all. He went to Berlin and discovered that almost all the bunker inhabitants had been captured by the Soviets and imprisoned in Russia. Still, he was able to find “fringe” witnesses, such as guards and soldiers, as well as to interview high-ranking Nazi officers who had not been in the bunker at the time but knew of the events that had taken place there. And, of course, he used the testimony of Klempka and Karnov.

  Trevor-Roper published a book, The Last Days of Hitler, in which he concluded that Hitler had in fact committed suicide. Such was Trevor-Roper’s reputation that, for most people, the book effectively put to rest the belief that he might have survived. Still, the Soviets continued to deny they knew anything about Hitler’s fate.

  Then in 1968 there was a sensational development. For reasons never explained, Kremlin leaders admitted they had not only recovered the charred corpses of Hitler and Braun on May 4, 1945, five days after their death, but also had conducted autopsies on the bodies and, through odontology (forensic dentistry) had positively identified them as those of the Führer and his wife.

  This revelation, complete with pictures and diagrams of the dead man’s teeth, was contained in a book, The Death of Hitler, by a Soviet historian, Lev Bezymenski. But was it Hitler’s body that had been recovered, or a double’s? Bezymenski had no doubt it was the Führer’s, but his fascinating story of the discovery of the body raised the possibility that doubles might have been used as part of Hitler’s security system, or as decoys to enable him to escape. In fact, the first body found
by the Russians near the bunker and initially identified as the Führer’s was a double’s. Meanwhile, a Russian soldier had found the bodies of another man, a woman and two dogs in a nearby crater that was strewn with burned paper. But in the belief that Hitler’s body had already been found, the two new corpses were covered in blankets and buried. Later, when it was discovered the first body was not Hitler’s but that of a look-alike, the two corpses were dug up again and sent to a Berlin suburb, where autopsies were performed.

  Both of the corpses were burned severely, and parts of the cranium were missing in each case. Splinters of glass and parts of a thin-walled capsule were found in the mouths, which, together with the “smell of bitter almonds,” convinced the forensic specialists that both the male and the female had poisoned themselves.

  But were they really Hitler and Eva Braun? Charred bodies, as I have learned in my experience with both fires and airplane crashes, are the most difficult to identify. You have indications of height, race, sex and age, and sometimes bones yield evidence of previous fractures which are helpful in identification. But almost always the teeth are the main clue. And there we rely on the science of forensic odontology, by which means surviving teeth and bridges are compared to previous X rays and medical records of dental work to positively identify an anonymous corpse.

  In the upper jaw of the corpse tentatively identified as Adolf Hitler’s were nine teeth connected by a gold bridge. The lower jaw had fifteen teeth. Soviet forensic scientists removed both the bridge and the lower jaw and delivered them to Soviet Counterintelligence, which was assigned the task of identifying the body.